Google+ History/Moments – Finally a real API?

It’s only taken, what is it now, 11 months, but Google+ might finally be able to receive data from other services in what looks like a new read/write API called Google+ History, or according to the beta forum, Google+ Moments. It’s only available for developers at the moment, but Google’s Louis Gray today gave VentureBeat the inside scoop on Google+ History, a new API which will allow developers to give users the ability to share “past statuses, updates, purchases, pictures, and more” from other services.

While details are still not entirely clear, Google+ History sounds like it will be similar to Google Instant Upload for photos, where the content from other services goes into your account and waits for you to share it. So don’t expect instant Twitter syncing (which could possibly kill or save Google+, depending on which argument you look at) but instead look at buying a song on Google Music or any other music service and then going to Google+ and manually sharing it. It’s annoying that Google isn’t opening up the floodgates, but then, doing that could kill Google+, as it will just become another Google Buzz, where all the content is on Twitter or Facebook already and not specially formatted for Google+

It’s still early days, and it could be good for Foursquare check-ins, and even Twitter or Facebook syncing (if the already-available documentation changes) but if you’re a developer looking to get your hands dirty, then click here to test the History API. Otherwise, wait around for a few months and maybe, just maybe, it might show up in regular Google+.